by Jack Lindsay
11. Belt and girdle
Folktale does not lack episodes in which the hero is aided by a self-acting rope; and the girdle, the usual form taken by the saving thread of the maiden, has a wide history in custom and belief, especially in fertility aspects, eg the kestos of Aphrodite. In the youth initiations of the Hungarian peasantry the central part is played by a belt, which is carefully handed down from generation to generation. We have seen Maui’s girdle as the rainbow-thread of sky-ascent. Also the girdle is the symbol of the Maiden Castle, the mother-goddess in her aspects as the inviolable city-guardian, as the city itself.
Ariadne in the Greek myth guides and helps the hero who kills the monster; without her he would not have succeeded, but it is he who does the crucial deed. However, the maiden alone with her thread can confront and defeat the monster; and this theme comes out clearly in a culture, such as our medieval one, which lays stress on the virtue of chastity. In pageantry we find the Maiden leading the Dragon with her girdle or thread, often in combination with St George. Voragine in the Golden Legand says that after his victory the saint bade the maid put her girdle round the monster, which then became tame and let itself be led into the city to be killed. The monster is thus twice subdued, by combat and by the thread. Two trails of myth have coalesced, or, from another angle, the unity of myth in the Ariadne story has broken into two. At Norwich the Dragon was led by Saint Margaret; she had taken one of the leading roles in the Christianization of dragon-taming legends. Here, at Norwich, she was linked with Saint George, with whom she had no connection except a common taste for subduing dragons and who was ordered in 1408 to ‘make a conflict with the Dragon’. In Provence at festivals the local monster, the Tarasque, was led in captivity by the maid, with no hero at all. At Tarascon on Whit Monday the girl miming Sainte Marthe was dressed in white with a blue veil; she carried a vessel of holy water in one hand and led the Tarasque with a silken thread.[427]
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12. Measurement of thread or stick
In myths of the Malekulan death ritual we find the dead man dependent on a cane, cut to his body length, which is buried with him. He is thought to sling a sacrificed fowl on this ‘measuring-stick’, gnaw the bark of a certain magic tree, walk through the cave of the dead to the shore, cross the river by striking it with the cane and parting the waters, meet the female guardian, and be ferried over. In medieval times (and still in some Roman Catholic countries) cures for sickness were sought by measuring a saint’s body with string or fillet, then passing the string round the sufferer. Simon de Montfort was reputed to have caused many miraculous cures in this way. Pope Clement VIII was said to have given his sanction to a measurement of the ‘true and correct length of Our Lord Jesus Christ’ found in the Holy Sepulchre, and copies of it were current in Germany still in the nineteenth century. In Germany, till the late medieval period, ease of birth throes was sought by measuring a wick the length of Saint Sixtus’ image and then wearing it as a girdle. The same principle appears in the practice, still used, of making a votive candle of the same size and weight as the vower. In Mexico headaches were cured by the measurement of the head of Saint Francis of Magdalena, stomach aches by the measurement of his stomach, and so on. Other images have been similarly used.
Here instead of the thread linking two objects or persons, it is used to store up spirit energy on a measurement principle; the energy can then be transferred. In a sense the measured thread becomes an external soul of the person measured. By a similar line of reasoning a disease can be transferred by means of a measurement and thus got rid of. The settlers in Virginia and Pennsylvania measured children for the disease called Gobacks with a yarn-string. They hung the string on a gate-hinge (a passage point) in the presence of the child’s parents, and the disease decayed with the string.[428]
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13. Some conclusions
It is then clearly not enough to take customs connected with a child’s navel-string as meaning that that object was merely an external soul or a substitute (part for whole) for the child himself. ‘This idea explains a common set of beliefs concerned with the placenta, umbilical cord and the caul. In Amboina, the placenta is hidden away in a tree; similarly in the Babar Islands, where on their way to the tree, the women carry weapons, “because evil spirits might, if they got hold of the placenta, make the child ill”.’ In the Watabela Islands the placenta is buried under a tree. The remains of the umbilical cord are preserved, to be used as medicine for the child. In the islands Loti, Moa and Lakor, the child’s navel-string is kept, and used by him later as an amulet in war or when travelling. The Central Australians work the navel-string into a necklace and the child wears it round its neck. ‘This makes it grow, keeps it quiet, and averts illness.’ The connection between these appurtenances and the idea of the external soul is also seen in the following cases. The Fijians buried the umbilical cord with a coconut, the latter being intended to grow up to the time the child reached maturity. It is interesting to compare the modern custom of planting a tree as a record of the birth of a child. The navel-string and the placenta are in South Celebes called the ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ of the child.
Certainly in such cases the idea of an external soul is strong, but the idea of a force conductor is never far from any of the thread systems. With the Fijians there is a complex union of child, navel-string and tree; the idea of external soul is linked with the idea of union with natural forces. The tree is both an external soul and a nature-guardian. In a creation myth from Indochina a creeper plays the part of the navel-string or thread connecting two worlds; when it was cut, blood poured out, with different colours; from the black blood as it splashed on earth was born wildfowl; from the red, deer; from the yellow, a monster tiger who was hunted down in a myth of the great-hunt type.
We may summarize our inquiry then by saying that while the navel-string is clearly of primary importance in the building of the thread symbol, it becomes linked with many other images of growth and interconnection — liana, tree, bough — and its magical force is much increased by the thread of spinning and weaving, which in turn is linked with the spider-web. It appears again and again in rituals of birth, marriage, death, in initiations and ordeals, bringing about an enclosed space of force or liberating force along its channel, uniting as in marriage or providing the bridge between life and life, between life and death or death and life. It thus played an important part in the shamanist spirit journey, directly, or in myths of the culture hero who raids the otherworld for a bride or some new tool or food-product. The labyrinth reveals its power of both connecting and separating; it links this world and the spirit-world, but by complex pattern it bars out those who lack the clue, the guiding thread. (Our very word clue, clew, means both a ball of thread and a guiding principle or line.)
There can then be no doubt that Ariadne’s thread and labyrinth belong to the series investigated and that to see them in this focus helps us to grasp their full meaning as nothing else can. It also helps to illuminate Helen’s fillets, the threads hanging from the tree. In these threads an image or a mask may be caught; but their primary function is to provide a free and safe flow of fertilizing energy between man and nature. The examples given could be vastly extended.[429]
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14. The Chain of Zeus
We see that the chain or rope by which Zeus hangs Hera or by which he defies the other gods to pull him down, even if touched in the poem by a note of Ionian burlesque, has behind it the very ancient series of myths and rituals that surround the shaman in his spirit-journey. (No doubt there is also a reference to the tug-of-war game played by two teams at the opposite ends of a rope, which was known to the Greeks; but underlying the game is ritual and ritual myth.) So, when the Greeks proceeded to find in the thread of Zeus a symbol of the bonds that hold the universe together in its complex and living unity, they were laying hold of a genuine element in the primitive image and developing it with a far greater philosophic consciousness, a more systematic and rigorous a
pplication of its premises. Already in the Rhapsodic Theogony (an Orphic poem which in substance may go back in this matter as far as the sixth century BC) the possibilities of the image are realized. Zeus asks Night: ‘Mother, highest of deities, divine Night, tell me how I shall set up my proud empire over the immortals? How by my efforts shall the All be One and the Parts distinct? Surround all things with the divine Aither, then put in the centre the sky and the boundless earth and the sea and the constellations that crown the sky. But when you have set a solid bond round all things, tying a Golden Chain to the Aither...’
But whether or not the Orphics had begun to develop the idea by the end of the archaic era, it appears fully fledged in Plato. (The Pythagoreans as well as the Orphics may have early exploited the image.) In the Theaitetos Sokrates states that ‘as long as the sun and the heavens go round in their orbits, all things human and divine are and are preserved, but if they were chained up and their motions ceased, all things would be destroyed, and, as the saying goes, turned upside down.’ In the Republic without mentioning Homer, Plato develops the idea of a pillar or axis of light, ‘very like the rainbow’, stretching across sky and earth, ‘a bond that binds the heavens as the under-girths that bind a ship’, and holding together all the revolving spheres. Further, other Greek writers saw the golden chain as the planets, or the four elements, or Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, or Heimarmene (Fate). Macrobius saw in the golden chain of I comer the symbol of the way that ‘everything follows in continuous succession and deteriorates stage by stage from the first to the last degree....From the supreme deity to the lowest life everything is united and bound by mutual and for ever indissoluble links’. Hence the golden chain ‘hanging in God’s hand from the vault of heaven and descending to earth’. Neoplatonists with their intuitions of an organic universe of hierarchical levels seized on to the symbol: Olympiodoros or Proklos. The Pseudo-Dionysios, the Areopagite, used the image to express the way men hauled themselves aloft by the rope of prayer. (A little Rosicrucian book, Aurea corona Homeri, was important in forming the youthful Goethe’s thought.)
In ancient Greece, then, as in India, the idea or image of the spirit-thread linking all things had deep and enduring effects.
For the cord as the guiding principle in individual life we may take Ploutarch’s On the Daimōn of Sokrates where he says that the soul, psyche, is submerged in the body, ‘but the uncorrupted part is called nous’, it ‘swings above the head, touching the top of the skull; it is like a cord, which must be held and with which one must guide the lower part of the spirit for as long as it proves obedient and is not overcome by the appetites of the flesh’.[430]
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